A US forum talking about people they pre-consider terrorists of a country they surely can't pin point in a map. What can go wrong...
Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say
731–740 of 1001 posts
Re: Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say
#732Re: Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say
#733Earlier quoted context omitted.
But by definition the founders of the USA were terrorists. And they knew it too, viz. Benjamin Franklin's famous line 'Gentlemen, we must all hang together or we shall most assuredly hang separately.' Preemptively invalidating all non-state actors is just a way for people with power to avoid challenges to it. Every single oppressive regime describes rebels as terrorists and employs circular arguments to assert its ow…
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Re: Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say
#734Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who is using a pager or walkie talking in 2024? I will admit there was maybe a few bystanders standing too close to a Hezbollah member, but how many non-Hezbollah members do you think really had one of these pagers? Keep in mind Israel also does surveillance and probably tracked where they went. If it turns out a material % of these were owned by civilians, I might agree with you, but I suspect that’s not the case.
I own walkie talkies. So does any large retail store in the US, they're given to staff to communicate. Every film set with more than 10 crew members uses them. I could go on. I'm amazed people come to a web community about technology to broadcast such ignorance.
Did you buy your walkie talkie in a batch shipment with Hezbollah?
Re: Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say
#735Earlier quoted context omitted.
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>return the land to whom it rightfully belongs History puts pretty much everyone in the world living on land that was taken from someone else at some point in time. And if we all did our best to move to where our parents/GPs/GGPs came from we'd again face the issue of that land having been taken previously. This line of thinking is turtles all the way down and in no way a helpful path towards getting two peoples who…
The thing is, 'at some point in time' happens to be 'right now, today' in places like the West Bank. 'This sort of thing has always happened in history' is an incredibly poor argument to deflect responsibility for ongoing oppression. Jewish critics of Zionism have repeatedly pointed out how these very arguments have been employed against Jews in the not-so-distant past. Why would anyone reasonly expect Palestinians to be any less committed to their own collective existence?
Re: Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say
#736Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Whether terror is an intended effect or not, Israel is engaging in it. Perhaps in the scheme of things as far as military operations are concerned this is "low" collateral damage. But if 3000+ people were wounded that means potentially tens of thousands experienced the traumatic event of explosives going off in a public space. And hundreds more are mourning family.
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Re: Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say
#737Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Approx half the casualties are civilians Citation needed for that. None of the news reports, even the heavily biased ones, have reported mass civilian casualties.
The citation, as requested: "two children and four health workers in a hospital in southern Beirut were among the 12 people who were killed on Tuesday." - Public Health Minister Firas Abiad in a press conference So that's 50% of those killed, right? and that's just health workers and children (who were 8 and 11 years old, btw). Also, there were multiple footage of the devices exploding among civilians in dense market…
casualties refers to injuries as well as deaths. I think the citation they were looking for was for the ~2800 number. I don't think it's reasonable to say that 6/12 killed were civilians, so half of all casualties were civilian.
We dont know until we get more reports, like you said, it could be higher... but it could also be lower.
Re: Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say
#738Earlier quoted context omitted.
Al Qaeda isn't a nation-state so by definition it falls into terrorism. It's like if Greenpeace sunk a military vessel because the sonar was killing sea life that would be terrorism. It would have some serious side effects if it was OK for private non-governmental actors being able to target militaries and be seen as legitimate in their actions.
But by definition the founders of the USA were terrorists. And they knew it too, viz. Benjamin Franklin's famous line 'Gentlemen, we must all hang together or we shall most assuredly hang separately.' Preemptively invalidating all non-state actors is just a way for people with power to avoid challenges to it. Every single oppressive regime describes rebels as terrorists and employs circular arguments to assert its ow…
What Franklin said was true though. If the US revolutionaries had failed, they would have been rightfully hung for treason by the British. If you're some private actor attacking military targets in some country, you'd be a terrorist. I'm no fan of Iran for example but if somebody was caught launching rockets at an IRGC base the Iranian government could legitimately treat them as terrorists/traitors no problem.
Re: Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say
#739Earlier quoted context omitted.
My phrasing says exactly what it says - that this was indiscriminate. Do you think the IDF considered whether civilians would be harmed, or have a good possibility of being harmed? Surely blowing up thousands of devices in a major urban area would fall somewhere under this consideration.
I suppose that depends on how many of the injured people were bystanders, as opposed to being the people who owned the pagers, do you agree?
Not really. If you fire a rifle into a crowd and manage not to injure someone, you're still recklessly disregarding lives, or more poignant to this discussion, if a terrorist attack fails in some way, you'd still call it terrorism - but this is getting pedantic - the amount of videos I've seen surfacing suggests that more than a few bystanders have been injured or killed.
Re: Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say
#740Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actual combat and conventional attacks on a guerilla force embedded in an urban civilian population is far more catastrophic and less surgical than the risk of being inside the ~0.5m lethal radius of these pagers. It's a horrific attack with awful innocent deaths at the same time that any conventional attack that achieved the same impact on Hezbollah would have been even worse for those around them.
I'm not so sure. It certainly shook Hezbollah and no doubt some of the dead or seriously injured held sufficiently important jobs within the organization to cause problems. On the other hand you now have a few thousand people who suffered unpleasant but not debilitating injuries who are now sadder, wiser, and very very pissed off. My impression is that many of those attacked could have been middle managers or mid-ran…
I see it a bit differently, or at least I see a different possibility. Most of the injured were pager-owning Hezbollah members who were already pissed off in a way that has religious & ideological foundations unlikely to be changed regardless of events. The general populace might go either way, angry at the attack and/or angry at the Hezbollah members for attacking a much more powerful enemy and bringing the violence into their community.